Saturday, September 23, 2000

Well now. Fray Day 4. The best way I can describe it is: it was a Happening. A genuine Happening. And I'm glad I could make it.

Before I continue, a prologue. Regular readers will know that I don't usually go on about the 'big names' of weblogging and the whole San Francisco creative web scene because, well, I don't know them any better than any other reader of their work does, and I'm not that comfortable with discussing them as if they're just these guys I see around the place, even though the 'everywhereness' of the web does encourage that feeling.

While I've been happy with the way my own site is developing, I know full-well that people like Lance Arthur and Derek Powazek have been doing this kind of thing for years. They were building story-telling sites on the web when I was still spouting off thousands of words on mailing lists and Usenet (now there's a monument for the ages). Once you get beyond being a callow youth, you learn to treat pioneers with respect. That also means you don't spend all your time gushing like a fan at a Beatles concert.

(Man, I can't believe how old-fogeyish that sounds. Hello, my name is Rory, and I am nine-ty-tw-w-w-wooo.)

That said, it is dead, dead cool to be in the same room as these guys when you've only ever known them by their work. I didn't really get to meet many of the big names, because there were a lot of people there tonight, but a bunch of them were up onstage. It was a packed programme, so if you wanted to catch all the performances there wasn't a lot of time left to mingle.

So what did I learn? That Derek Powazek really does seem to be an incredibly nice guy, as enthusiastic and energetic as he comes across on the screen. That John Styn, whose site I admit isn't one of my regular haunts, is a knockout comedian in the flesh; his tale of appearing on 'Studs' just about stole the show. That Lance Arthur, who online is one of the funniest of personal story-tellers, onstage is one of the bravest; he stole the show back. And that most everyone else onstage tonight was just way too talented.

And too garrulous. The whole thing went overtime, and in the end there was only an hour of open mic for we lesser mortals.

I almost thought I wouldn't get a shot at it, but I got to go on second-last. Nervous as hell, which always happens when I go too long between performances; I'm fine once I've been doing it for a while, but eighteen months between drinks is too long. But at least I could read from the page; reciting from memory something I wrote at 4 am last night was always going to be a bit iffy.

It went down well with the crowd, who laughed in the right places. One audience-member thought the last bit displayed a fairly colonialist attitude for an Australian—which horrified me, because that's the exact opposite of what I intended. I was being ironic, I told him afterwards. He reminded me that Americans don't do irony.

So, for the benefit of any irony-deficient readers out there (and you may or may not know who you are): I do not think it is good that it's so pitifully easy to be 'rich' and 'famous' in Madagascar. It is deeply, deeply disturbing; more than you can know until you've been there. (Or until you read my best-selling in-depth travelogue, coming soon to a bookstore near you!) (See? Irony!)

That's the trouble with a five-minute slot; it's a bit hard to fit in all the subtleties, footnotes and caveats.

Now it's 4 am again, and I'm feeling a bit frayed around the edges. So, until next year...

Seems like half of Generation X is reminiscing about nukes. I was going to say 'the boomers had Levitt homes and cars with fins, and we had nuclear weapons', but of course the boomers had nukes, too (after all, there's a reason why 1950s cars had fins). So I wonder why these dark memories of the mushroom cloud are such a particularly Gen X thing. Maybe they're not, and I'm just indulging in the typical conceit of believing that my generation invented everything—but there does seem to have been a distinctive character to Gen X nuclear terror.

What we had in our formative years that the boomers didn't was nuclear winter. It was only in the early 1980s that computer modelling became powerful enough to paint an unequivocal picture of who would survive a nuclear war: nobody. The post-apocalyptic scenarios of the 1950s and 1960s, outlined in classic science fiction tales like A Canticle for Leibowitz, were certainly grim enough, but at least they depicted a world with people, even if most of them were mutants or mad. But nuclear winter, we knew, had no room for people. No room for anything, much. By the time the black clouds cleared, the only life left on earth would be bacteria on the ocean floor.

When the first crop of boomers were growing up, nuclear weapons were still variants on Fat Man and Little Boy. God knows, they were horrific enough, but there were limits to their destructive power and to how far they could reach. But Gen X grew up under the cloud of the hydrogen bomb, the neutron bomb, and the inter-continental ballistic missile, and more of them than you could count.

The defining nuclear movie for me wasn't On the Beach, or even The Day After; it was WarGames. Yes, it's a movie about teenage hackers, and I was one at the time of its release (in the 1983 sense of the word); but that's not why I remember it. I remember watching the final scene where the hacked military computer lights up a map of the world with red criss-crossing lines as it tries out every possible permutation of missile paths, and thinking: this is exactly how it would be. No escape.

Of all the messages you could send to someone in their teenage years about the world and the future, mutually-assured destruction is pretty much the exact wrong one. It dovetails perfectly with the depression and uncertainty that comes with being an adolescent. By 1984, when I was 16, Reagan was cranking up the rhetorical pressure on the 'Evil Empire' to the point where half of my peers expected the bombs to start flying any day. As a 32-year-old, I can understand the game he was playing, even if it was way too close to Russian roulette for my liking; but most teenagers don't know much about politics, and I was no exception. Reagan meant to strike fear into the Russians—not that he would actually bomb them, but that he would outspend them, on laser-armed satellites and supercomputers—but he also spooked a whole generation of Westerners.

Peter Garrett, the lead singer of Midnight Oil, ran for the Australian Senate in 1984 as a member of the fledgling Nuclear Disarmament Party. He narrowly missed winning one of six seats for the state of New South Wales. If 16-year olds could have voted, he would have walked it in, and not because we liked the music on Red Sails in the Sunset.

Nineteen eighty-four was a high-water mark for nuclear angst matched only by 1961 and the Bay of Pigs. The tide began to subside the following year when Gorbachev became the Soviet premier, and retreated more quickly once the West realised the mark of the man. In 1989 it seemed to go out forever.

But the sea of nukes is still out there, and my generation grew up swimming in it. Maybe that's why we can't help wondering when the tide will come back in.

This afternoon (Thursday) I went downtown and caught a movie, then headed into Chinatown for dinner. Walking back down Grant Street in the cool early evening air I marvelled once again at what a sublime city this can be. The skyscrapers of the financial district not above but beside you, thanks to the hills you're walking on; the chirp of toy crickets in a dozen Chinatown shops; the buzz of the cable moving beneath your feet as you cross at the lights; black-and-whites driving past and stabbing the air with a second of siren; a lit-up Victorian building with fire-escape zig-zagging to the ground in delicate iron. No wonder the locals love it.

My most cherished find was a breathtakingly innocent explanation in the Detroit Free Press of what a nameless Australian basketball player meant when he reportedly called American Vince Carter a certain word that rhymes with banker. The correspondent was not closely enough acquainted with the term to provide a full and literal interpretation, but proposed instead that it appeared to mean "jerk", which is certainly close enough for me.

Last-week's-news Dept: the Millennium Dome could be knocked down. From the way people talked about it when I was in London in August, I don't suppose too many would care, but it seems a shame nonetheless. All that money for something that lasts only a year. The Crystal Palace lasted 85.

I didn't post much about it here when I visited it, but I didn't think it was that bad. Sure, twenty pounds seemed an insanely high ticket price compared to, say, a movie, but it was a full day's entertainment. It had its share of cheesy displays; but I definitely thought that Ovo, the dance-rock show in the huge central arena, was something incredible that I'd never seen the likes of before. A comparable show in the West End would cost more than twenty quid, and wouldn't be half as grand. Even the Peter Gabriel soundtrack CD was selling for sixteen.

It's a classic case of less is more. Taking them separately, I'd have been happy to pay twenty quid in total for Ovo, the Blackadder film, and maybe one or two of the displays. But diluted with a bunch of less-than-thrilling exhibits, the whole thing seemed less exciting. I certainly wouldn't recommend that a new visitor to London spend their limited time there; there are plenty of betterthingstosee.

Maybe the disillusionment Londoners feel with the Dome simply reflects the disillusionment we all feel with the magical Year 2000. Hands up if you felt a twinge of disappointment when none of the lights went out.

Except that releasing the songs as 25 MP3s is a bit of a fuck-you to fans with 56k modems as well—especially those in the UK on timed local calls. I'll bet they'd rather pay for a CD than spend twelve hours downloading the whole album. Yet another case where the promise of the net outstrips the mundane practicalities.

I'm also a little bemused by the claim that their label 'didn't give them the support they deserved'. We're talking about one of the biggest, most heavily-promoted rock bands of the 1990s. Their 'unsupportive' record label released an album of Smashing Pumpkins outtakes, a double-album (which in the CD age is saying something), an 'experimental' album, numerous EPs and lengthy CD-singles—pretty much the most any band could expect.

But what the hell. I know they're already out of fashion with the yoof of today, but Siamese Dream was and remains a masterpiece, and if I get access to a T1 connection and a CD-burner I'll be downloading with the best of 'em. [Thanks to sourground for the Machina II link.]

It's incredible that they'd edit out the one song that most Americans actually identify with Australia (as opposed to our national anthem). What on earth were they thinking?

On a related point: while looking for a link for the above, I was staggered to find this. A whole movie based on 'Waltzing Matilda'? Just how do you stretch that story out to ninety minutes? The billy boiling would take only five, and it would take less than that for the swagman to drown at the end. So that leaves eighty minutes of the squatter and troopers chasing the poor bastard, with him carrying a sheep the whole time. Novel, I admit, but a bit of a departure from usual dramatic structure.

It appears to us that some people are downloading two and even three times to different formats—to the Palm Pilot say, and also to whatever Microsoft uses. ... You couldn't go into a bookstore and say, "I want you to give me the paperback version and the audio version of this book free because I bought the hardcover." ... You must pay for what you take every time you take it or this won't work.

Oh, please. We're not talking hand-tooled leather covers here, we're talking bits. It shouldn't matter a toss if one person downloads a couple of different formats. No extra trees have died, and no extra hours have been expended in manufacture. They're paying for pure essence of story, and they shouldn't have to pay twice.

And thirteen bucks for the whole story? All going straight to the author? That's about ten or twenty times the royalty you'd get on a paperback. If people are willing to pay it, fine, but at that price—for bits—they could reasonably expect to get an extra format at no extra charge. If you're wanting analogies, Mr King, how about the bottomless cup of coffee for a buck fifty?